Some journeys unfold on maps; others unfold in the quiet places where fear, faith, and free will meet. Our conversation with D Paul Fleming travels that second road. He grew up amid violence, carried a warrior’s discipline into Navy service, and emerged with injuries, visions, and a calling he tried for years to ignore. What follows is a story of a reluctant healer who now steps into rooms heavy with grief, properties burdened by old harm, and moments where the veil between life and death feels thinner than breath. Along the way, we touch the edges of Native tradition, Christian language, and the moral weight of titles that claim you long before you accept them.
Photos Courtesy of D Paul Fleming
D Paul’s account begins with the body, because the body keeps score: broken ribs from childhood, the shock of floating above cold water as sailors pull him from the sea, the scar tissue of service and survival. Yet his turning point arrives in stillness. As a teenager, cramped in a car’s backseat after a chemotherapy visit, he chooses to stop resisting what he feels moving through him. He shifts his intent from blocking to allowing, and a current of light rushes in. That choice—permission rather than control—becomes the blueprint for his work. He insists intent is the hinge of prayer and the lever of change, not a magic word but a clean decision that aligns will, attention, and action with something larger than ego or fear.
This work is not all gentle. D Paul draws a hard line around free will: no intervention without ownership. He describes clearing places and people, sometimes as dusting off light, other times as open conflict that ends with Archangel Michael escorting hostile forces out. At his lowest, he tried to shut it all down—asked his protection to step back—and immediately felt a presence like a moray eel surge in with the words, I’m here to take your soul. He called his protection home and watched a battle unfold. That scar of a lesson changed him. He stopped bargaining with his calling and started training for it the way a soldier trains for deployment: with respect, humility, and acceptance that stakes are real.
The stories that follow carry both weight and wonder. A young couple, told their unborn child is a medical catastrophe, plan for termination. D Paul places a malachite stone in the father’s hand and asks only this: have her pray for what she truly wants. The next morning’s ultrasound shows a healthy baby. He frames this not as personal power but as facilitation—being a hollow bone, a channel who holds a connection while the living choose their path. There are hauntings in small towns, police logs stacked with quiet terror, and a haunted inn whose restless energy pulled him into a series he never planned to write. There are dreams that forecast loss and force him to carry knowledge he would rather not hold. Gift or burden? He says both, because the edge between them is service.
Threaded through is heritage. Paul’s great-grandmother, driven from Plains homelands, walked back to give birth on ancestral ground. He grew up around powwows and circles, taught that spirit rests in all things. When he speaks of Christ, it is as a presence within, a light many traditions name in different tongues. He sees deep echoes between Native cosmology and Christian trinity, between warrior ethics and spiritual courage. Titles—holy man, shaman—don’t inflate him; they weigh on him. A title demands that you honor those who bore it before and protect those who will hold it after. It asks for humor too. He laughs often. He says the white-light side has a wicked sense of timing and joy. Humor and love, he reminds us, are the two tools that keep a healer human. 
What, finally, is the use of stories like these? One use is permission: to admit you have felt something you can’t explain and still claim reason, kindness, and responsibility. Another is caution: power without humility invites harm. Most of all, the use is courage. D Paul will not warn his younger self because every scar trained him for the work he now does. He does not fear death, and that fearlessness, he says, worries his guides more than it comforts them. But it is what he has to offer: to show up where darkness prowls, to ask for help, to keep intent clean, to protect free will, to laugh when laughter loosens the knots, and to remember that the point is not spectacle but healing. The map for this terrain is thin; the compass is how you love.
